Neal Gabler

Dorothy sings Over the Rainbow, still in black-and-white Kansas. Judy Garland's voice keeps going while the images on screen change: there are immigrants flooding through Ellis Island, ragtag families crowded together and smiling at the future; an overhead view of pushcarts on the streets of New York gives way to searchlights outside a Hollywood movie premiere and a burst of color, as if these immigrants had arrived in Oz. This stunning two-minute sequence...

In the introduction to his magnificent biography of Walt Disney, author Neal Gabler writes, "More than any other American artist (Walt Disney) defined the terms of wish fulfillment and demonstrated on a grand scale to his fellow Americans, and ultimately to the entire world, how one could be empowered by fantasy -- how one could learn, in effect, to live within one's own illusions and even to transform the world into those illusions." There has been much written about Disney, but Gabler's Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Knopf)

AMAZING GRACE: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. By Jonathan Kozol. Crown. $23. 286 pp. In this stunningly simple and eloquent book, Kozol continues to be our voice in the wilderness of America's childhood. This time, he focuses on the children of New York's South Bronx. He never once blinks, nor does he sugarcoat the utterly bleak lives of these innocent victims of poverty. -- THE EDUCATION OF A WOMAN: The Life of Gloria Steinem. By Carolyn G. Heilbrun. The Dial Press.

LIFE THE MOVIE: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. Neal Gabler. Knopf. $25. 303 pp.The New York Times In Jim Carrey's hit movie The Truman Show, a young man named Truman Burbank discovers that his entire life has been grist for a hit television show, that he was brought up by actors playing his parents, that he is married to a woman cast as his wife and sent out to live and work on a huge stage set. In his new book, Life the Movie, the cultural historian...

LIFE THE MOVIE: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. Neal Gabler. Knopf. $25. 303 pp.The New York Times In Jim Carrey's hit movie The Truman Show, a young man named Truman Burbank discovers that his entire life has been grist for a hit television show, that he was brought up by actors playing his parents, that he is married to a woman cast as his wife and sent out to live and work on a huge stage set. In his new book, Life the Movie, the cultural historian...

In the introduction to his magnificent biography of Walt Disney, author Neal Gabler writes, "More than any other American artist (Walt Disney) defined the terms of wish fulfillment and demonstrated on a grand scale to his fellow Americans, and ultimately to the entire world, how one could be empowered by fantasy -- how one could learn, in effect, to live within one's own illusions and even to transform the world into those illusions." There has been much written about Disney, but Gabler's Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Knopf)

One day, in his column read by millions of people in newspapers across the United States, Walter Winchell wrote that actress Bette Davis had cancer. She protested to Winchell that she did not. She was right. But to a press agent of the time that was beside the point. "Well if she doesn't have cancer," he told a fellow agent, "she better get it." Neal Gabler, the author of an acclaimed new biography of Winchell, tells this story with relish. That's HIS Walter, the demigod of gossip sitting atop American pop culture for 40 years like a Colossus, straddling the worlds of entertainment and politics with a power virtually unmatched in the history of journalism.

WINCHELL: GOSSIP, POWER AND THE CULTURE OF CELEBRITY. By Neal Gabler. Alfred A. Knopf. $30. 681 pp. Although he would die a defeated and largely reviled man, Walter Winchell presided over American mass culture for several decades, a self-appointed arbiter of power and taste, and an eerie harbinger of the culture of celebrity and gossip that would take hold in the country in the years to come. In Neal Gabler's enthralling new biography, Winchell emerges as a strangely emblematic figure - an avatar of "a cultural revolution in which control of the American agenda shifted from the mandarins of high culture to the new masters of mass culture."

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Sheehan`s masterful work melds history and biography. As he tells the story of Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, who went to Vietnam in 1962 and died there a decade later, Sheehan unflinchingly lays bare U.S. involvement in a hapless land. His richly detailed work is a searing indictment of conventional wisdom gone awry as the United States tried to apply old rules to a new world, of myopic military leaders "overcome by their malady of victory," and of the evolution of "the bright shining lie" sowed by John F. Kennedy and brought to full flower by Lyndon Johnson.

WINCHELL: GOSSIP, POWER AND THE CULTURE OF CELEBRITY. By Neal Gabler. Vintage. $16. A child of poverty who escaped via vaudeville, Walter Winchell understood that people wanted to be entertained during the Depression, and gossip was cheap entertainment. The fast-talking, staccato-voiced columnist and broadcaster also knew that gossip was power because people were fascinated by celebrities. Still, as Gabler's definitive biography makes clear, Winchell was a horrible husband and a worse father; a nasty, petty man who waged vendettas against some celebrities (Lucille Ball)

Dorothy sings Over the Rainbow, still in black-and-white Kansas. Judy Garland's voice keeps going while the images on screen change: there are immigrants flooding through Ellis Island, ragtag families crowded together and smiling at the future; an overhead view of pushcarts on the streets of New York gives way to searchlights outside a Hollywood movie premiere and a burst of color, as if these immigrants had arrived in Oz. This stunning two-minute sequence...

AMAZING GRACE: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. By Jonathan Kozol. Crown. $23. 286 pp. In this stunningly simple and eloquent book, Kozol continues to be our voice in the wilderness of America's childhood. This time, he focuses on the children of New York's South Bronx. He never once blinks, nor does he sugarcoat the utterly bleak lives of these innocent victims of poverty. -- THE EDUCATION OF A WOMAN: The Life of Gloria Steinem. By Carolyn G. Heilbrun. The Dial Press.

One day, in his column read by millions of people in newspapers across the United States, Walter Winchell wrote that actress Bette Davis had cancer. She protested to Winchell that she did not. She was right. But to a press agent of the time that was beside the point. "Well if she doesn't have cancer," he told a fellow agent, "she better get it." Neal Gabler, the author of an acclaimed new biography of Winchell, tells this story with relish. That's HIS Walter, the demigod of gossip sitting atop American pop culture for 40 years like a Colossus, straddling the worlds of entertainment and politics with a power virtually unmatched in the history of journalism.

Eddie Jaffe, a press agent legendary for his lost causes, chutzpah and angst, who all but made Broadway his alias and held that the best kind of promotion was self-promotion, died on Tuesday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 89 and had been hospitalized since November, said his daughter, Jordan Jaffe of Alexandria, Va., his only surviving family member. Until aging and complications from a hip operation confined him to his cluttered apartment near the theater district, the spectral Mr. Jaffe was a familiar presence at Gallagher's Steak House down the street and the rapidly vanishing haunts of Walter Winchell and Damon Runyon.

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. Neal Gabler. Alfred A. Knopf. Illustrated. $35. 851 pp. The reputation of Walt Disney -- the father of Mickey Mouse, the architect of Disneyland and the man once dubbed the 20th-century Aesop -- has gone through more violent swings than that of nearly any other popular artist. Sergei Eisenstein proclaimed his work "the greatest contribution of the American people to art." The critic Mark Van Doren called him a "first-rate artist" who "knows innumerable truths that cannot be taught."